I will also be hanging out with the leaders at Sunwest Church in Calgary, encouraging them in incarnational mission.

If you are in Calgary and want to come click on the images below for the details.

I have enjoyed my discovery of Dan White Jr. and feel I have finally connected with a long lost brother who has been on very similar journey. Read about that here in his post a Meandering Journey to Missional. Since I have been quoting this a lot recently… ”Our work of community should be rooted in the recovery of actual eye-contact, locality, regular availability, mutual vulnerability, shared mission and loyalty beyond our offenses”, I better share where it has come from. Dan, thanks for reminding us at The Journey to break away from the temptation of substitute community and embrace the mess, joy, delight and sacrifice of building Kingdom Community. Who knows where this could go!

– by Dan White Jr.

Modern Symbolism
One of the most complicated challenges we face surrounds the symbolism of community.  What is it? What does our popular imagination say it is?  What ideals do we harbor?  What expectations do we import?  Personally, my intense focus on community is directly tied to my take-away from the phenomenon of the New Testament church.  If the temple is no longer the space that contains God, what is?  I believe passionately that the landscape of the collective New Testament letters exposes that community is the POD for carrying the message of Jesus; it was and is the new container.  But the scaffolding of these early church communities were distinct.  Biblically informed community and American popular ideas of community are not the same.  Time and time again I see the Kingdom framework for community collide headlong into this concept I call “Substitute Community.”

The Challenge
Substitute community is a deluded version of a common-life.  Substitute communities do offer us an emotional return, a sense of belonging and a feeling of identity but my observation is that they are primarily delivered on “my own terms”.  The Manti Te’o experience is indicative of the story we find ourselves in. He was able to assemble some of the contents of a relationship without having an actual tethered relationship.   To him the relationship was real, which is the point.   To him, the relationship was meeting his emotional needs.  The challenge of building mutually submissive, faithful, mission-sent, spiritual households is starting to become clearer. The challenge is in arresting back this idea of community from the grip of felt-needs based connections.  Our learned behaviors from consumerism are spilling over into our symbolic definitions of community.

Commodified Versions
In my city, on the ground, so many believe they already have community because they have: Facebook friends that comfort them on a crummy day, blogs they follow religiously that have built into them a like-minded cluster, pod-casts from a trusted preacher they are not in actual relationship with, runners clubs, book clubs or any type of club they attend.  None of these are inherently bad but having furniture does not mean we have a house.  Community has become a commodity and we approach it the way we assemble our own custom meal from a buffet of options.   The center for belonging and becoming has eroded and is being parceled out.  It is possible to put together the semblance of community“a little of this and a little of that” and end up with a self-selected substitute community. We’ve emptied “community” of its meaning and filled it up with our own hand-picked desires.  Gradually what occurs is that we find our ideological tribe online or with people we hang out with occasionally but we don’t have to live with them, collaborate with them or persevere with them as we together submit to Jesus.  Living by this narrative makes relationships with people pieces we can swap out and replace, because there is not a plumb line of mutual submission.  This is a hyper individualistic approach to community that’s not the exception but has become the norm. The common denominator in these connections is that they meet my perceived emotional felt-needs for acceptance.  In this substitute community paradigm, my self-image is being shored up with very little, if anything required of me.  We must ask a rhetorical question; can we really experience connection without the pain of compromise?

A Subversive Approach
Kingdom-community binds me to a particular people, in a particular place, with particular rhythms, with a particular responsibility.  As a Missional pioneer I’m convinced recovering community should be a major point of anarchy for us. We are not on a mission to convert the cultural (Evangelical or Popular) slide from de-incarnational brands of community.  Instead we are subversive by practice. This inhabiting-ethos must become intentional no matter how up-hill it feels.  Our work of community should be rooted in the recovery of actual eye-contact, locality, regular availability, mutual vulnerability, shared mission and loyalty beyond our offenses.  It is worth contending for.  Kingdom-community is the space we create for humans to become more fully human as a beacon of the reign of King Jesus. The life of God is intended to be tangible in the life of a Kingdom community; it is the new temple, the new home of God.  Be prepared as you invite and challenge others to live into community alongside you, there is an awkward and frustrating transitional process from “Substitute Community”to ”Kingdom Community”.  

Here is a post by Mike to help promote his book but more importantly to promote what it could like like if we join God in what He is doing in our neigbourhoods, workplaces, cities. Lets join the movement!

“If you could have a big tree with only a little fruit or a small tree with lots of fruit, which would you choose? It’s about a choice, right?

“What type of leadership does the world need? In a 2001 interview, writer and management consultant Margaret Wheatley said, “We need to move from the leader as hero, to the leader as host. Can we be as welcoming, congenial, and invitational to the people who work with us as we would be if they were our guests at a party? Can we think of the leader as a convener of people? [We need] a fundamental and unshakeable faith in people. You can’t turn over power to people you don’t trust. It just doesn’t happen.”

The best practices of leadership – those that seem to bring lasting change and genuine renewal to organizations and individuals – mirror the Anabaptist vision. They’re practices that call us to covenant, community, faith, hope, and love. They are practices of hospitality and shalom.
More…

Much more needs to be said about an alternate leadership practice. See Len Hjalmerson’s review on Alan Hirsch’s latest book The Permanent Revolution as a critical way forward.

We must ask the same question Ausberger asks in Dissident Disciple (a great read)… How can I learn a spirituality of humility and equality before God unless I live a community where hierarchy is unnatural, where dominance is not rewarded, and where superiority is neither desirable nor inevitable?

It is true, yesterday myself and the Love Ottawa team met with Mayor Watson! Love Ottawa’s goal over the next season is to sharpen the cooperative network’s ability to bring the love of Christ to every neighbourhood in Ottawa, so who better to ask what are the needs in the city than the mayor. So here is how the meeting went down…

The meeting started with the Mayor talking about his little presbyterian church that is getting more gray each year.  He talked about his frustration with the gap between what is spoken from the pulpit and what is lived in the day to day of life. A frustration we could join with him in. He talked about his love for serving the poor and marginalized in our city and attending church bazaars. We talked about how the churches message needs to connect to place… serving the common good of the city. We talked about a younger generation of believers who are also concerned with following Jesus into the day to day. It was amazing to be able to discuss things of church and faith with the mayor.

We then got into why we were there in the first place. We asked, How can the church of Ottawa serve the city? At first he was taken back by the question… not to many people are asking what they can give they are asking what they can get. He then went to his place of passion, homelessness. Mayor Watson’s primary area of concern is the 9000 people in our city on a waiting list for affordable housing. Since the provincial government cut funding to cities for housing the whole weight is on cities to come up with the appropriate funds and they are falling short. “We need to get creative and find other solutions to meet this huge need in our city, he says.”

Michael Coe, who used to be homeless but now volunteers at a shelter, has a message for anyone hoping to become a municipal politician in Ottawa.“The candidates have to understand that the homeless situation is getting worse in Ottawa,” he said. “It’s not just them in the downtown core, it’s someone that’s in Kanata or Orleans that is not far away from losing their houses, and it’s families and youth.

“The youth today will be the families of tomorrow. If they’re not in stable housing now then the housing situation is going to get worse,” he said. (quote from CBC News)

The other issue is our food banks can’t keep up to the demand. “What could it look like to provide food and housing for every person in our city… I think this is something Jesus would get excited about!” (ok I am not sure if he said excited but he did say Jesus)

We then expressed our desire to join him in a collaborative effort to see both issues resolved and closed our time praying a blessing over him.

I left feeling like the mayor gave a prophetic message to the church. His words were conversational and in no way directive but it was what the Spirit was doing, what God was saying. So here were the questions running through my mind on the drive home…

I don’t understand why we could have these issues in our city and the church continues with their building campaign.

I don’t understand how mission is seen as what happens in other countries yet we forget about our own neighbourhoods and cities

I don’t understand how churches spend money on programs to attract people but very little on sending people back into the needs of the city

I don’t understand why sermons are given each Sunday that do not connect with the day to day of life

I don’t understand how disciples of Jesus can sit back and not be an answer to the cities problems

I don’t understand why churches are not joining together to serve the city

I don’t understand why more collaboration is not happening with the primary goal of serving the common good.

Church has become predictable…You go to a building, someone gives you a bulletin, you sit in a chair, you sing a few songs, a guy delivers a message, someone sings again, you go home. I mean, really? Is that all God intended for us? What could it look like for the church in the city to serve the city?

Hopefully this conversation with the Mayor has sparked something in the Spirit, awakening the church in the city to come together and serve the needs in the city. This won’t happen overnight but what can you do to help? How can you serve? What ideas do you have?

We all love good stories but I particularly love good stories on neighbouring. In a culture of isolation and loneliness it takes intentionality to see our neighbourhoods become places of community. Places of interaction, eating, and play. Here is a remarkable story captured  by Shauna Niequist, one of the Storyline Contributors.

“My friend Sarah and I worked at a summer camp together about a hundred years ago, and we reconnect whenever I’m in Texas. I spent a weekend in Dallas in December, and Sarah invited me over for lunch with a few friends. She told me that every year she chooses a theme word, and that her word for 2012 was COMMUNITY.

She decided that instead of talking about community in some vague but well-intentioned way, her specific goal would be to gather 500 people around her table in 2012, one meal at a time.

She asked her dad to build a table in her backyard. It’s a gorgeous outdoor cedar dining table with benches that seat 22 people, and in the trees high above the table they hung chandeliers made from twisted branches.

She hosted lunches and dinners and neighborhood concerts. She invited friends and neighbors and strangers to share meals around her table. She marked every holiday with an invitation that said “the more, the merrier.” And then on Thanksgiving Day, the 500th guest sat at her table—she’d reached her goal more than a month early.

When 2012 began, Sarah knew the names of two neighbors. By the end of that year, she knew over 50. She threw 27 parties, averaging 19 guests per party. Her parties were attended by eighth-graders and executives; gay friends and grandparents; priests, pilots, and Pilates instructors.

At every party, guests signed their names on the table, and Sarah says that the community they formed along the way wrote the story of that table together. And the gatherings themselves unfolded with community spirit — one person holding a new mom’s baby so she could eat for a minute, someone jumping up to refill glasses, a first-time guest volunteering to load the dishwasher. Everyone pitched in, and some of the sweetest memories were made bumping into each other in the kitchen, washing dishes together long after dinner was over.

Our lunch was mid-December, an unseasonably warm day. I came a little early, and the table was already set with navy and white stripes—my favorite thing. So very thoughtful. So very Sarah. We opened a bottle of sparkling rose and caught up in the kitchen while we made carrot soup with cilantro cream, poppyseed chicken, asparagus and tomato salad.

When the guests arrived, we stood in a circle and she introduced each one. She does this, I learned, at every gathering — she says something wonderful about each person as she introduces them, because she wants every guest to feel confident as they sit down with new faces, and she wants each person to know just a little bit about the people they’re sitting with.

I realized during the introductions that many of these friendships had been created around this table. Before the table, before this year, before the goal, these were strangers, but one came to a dinner with another friend, another showed up at Easter, another for brunch: community born and nurtured around the table.

My dear friend Sarah turned her backyard into a dining room, and set what seemed like an impossible goal. And then meal by meal, week by week, friend by friend, she lived out her intention. Her life changed because of it, and so did the lives of hundreds of people, literally, in Dallas and beyond.

When I look back at 2012, at the moments that shaped me and spoke to me most profoundly, I count the hours around Sarah’s lovely backyard table as among the most meaningful of the year.

Sounds so simply yet is so transformational. What can you do to bring community to your neighbourhood?

As our team met to discuss the upcoming season of Lent my thoughts moved to the city… the neighbourhood. How can these liturgical rhythms inform place? Then I came across a post at the Parish Collective on how one church is allowing place to inform Holy Week. Brandon Rhodes writes…

“If the gospel of Jesus has public implications, and not just private/interior ones, then our liturgical lives should reflect that.  And if our church life is meant to be first-and-foremost local, then we should expect our particular locality to also have a big part in our liturgical life.  Together, the local is the primary public arena for our life, worship, and liturgical rhythms.

What I’ve learned about the public implications of the gospel, though, usually have a lot to do with a national or global crisis – important issues like extreme poverty, climate change, and child soldiers.  And accordingly I’ve seen such challenges be confronted by the gospel in prayer books, worship songs, response liturgies, and advocacy campaigns.

But I’ve not learned much about how to display, imagine, or express the gospel’s public implications at the local level.  How do the assets and challenges, the saintliness and the sinfulness, of my neighborhood interact with the good news of Jesus’ risen regnancy?  And how, when we hear the gospel’s summons to signpost new creation, can we think first of our own context and second of bigger global issues?  Surely, after all, God’s shalom and justice have something to say to my block…

Tailoring our gospel imagination around our neighborhood will include “Sunday morning” activities which focus our hopes and laments on our own blocks.  That’s where we at Springwater have found vitality in practicing an open time of “God-sighting’s” and “kingdom-sightings,” where we can point out where we saw Jesus Christ at work in one another and our neighborhood.  Sometimes that’s as tiny as gratitude for a housemate doing more chores than usual, as staggering as a neighbor turning from addiction, as mystical as springtime birdsongs chirping God’s praise, and as concrete as a new crosswalk making it safer for kids to get to school.

We’re also in the midst of exploring how to follow the liturgical calendar in a way that tunes us to God’s story playing out among us.  How might Lent be seen as a life coursing through our streets?

This year we’ll be letting God’s work in our neighborhood take center stage for Holy Week in a participatory reflection on remembering, lamenting, and hoping…

Maundy Thursday – Seder Meal: As the Passover meal remembers God’s great deliverance in the Exodus story, we’ll remember the little exoduses of deliverance we’ve seen on our streets, at our jobs, and in our homes.

Good Friday – Lament Service: Usually we extinguish candles after reading laments, until the room is dark, remembering all the while the darkness of the world carried by Christ.  Mingled with that activity we will post notecards of lament — where we have seen darkness and brokenness and fracture in our neighborhood.  Though we seek an asset-based posture in life and ministry, we also create space in our liturgy and minds to be honest about the darker legacies of our neighborhood, and remember that Jesus has crippled that darkness on Golgotha.

Easter Sunday: After replacing invasive thistles with native plants in a nearby park, we’ll celebrate with food, music, and map-posting hopes for where resurrection and new creation can spring up in our neighborhood in the year to come.

In years past we’ve not always given much harmony between these three holy days, nor have we considered our neighborhood that much in their liturgies.  But hopefully this map can be the thread that vivifies them all together, and reminds us of the locally-public nature of the gospel story that those holy days tell.  In so doing, we can “re-place” liturgy’s summons to remember, lament, and hope in Jesus and for the world.”

This has me thinking about how to reflect place in our liturgical rhythms at The Journey.

How has your community involved your particular context in your liturgical and worship life?

The  world is shifting, changing and it is the responsibility of the church to adapt and shift to these changes but sadly we ignore and slip more and more into irrelevancy. I want to be purposeful in going in the other direction, but how? How can we tangibly love our city outside the walls of our safe comfortable buildings? There are numerous ways like attending festivals, playing in your city, working in public spaces… but one that has captured my attention recently is office space.

At The Journey we do not have a building and we do not have office space so over these past few years of our church plant I have taken up my fare share of space in the local coffee shops. This has provided spontaneous counselling session, great conversations and because of the posture of listening and loving trust was established. I loved being called pastor by the barista’s.  But now we have 3 staff and growing, now what? How do we plan and strategize? Bridgehead does not like it when you write on their walls with dry markers. How do we build team yet maintain the value of listening, collaboration, dialogue?

I started investigating office space and every time I would vist a space I just felt inside that this is not me, this is not us. I did not want to become an irrelevant church pandering to the needs of christians, I want to serve my city, I want to join God in the restoration of all things.  It was in the middle of the, what do we do now guestion, that I met Sarah Chan from The Journey. Our conversation was on social innovation, collaboration, dialogue and office space came up and she asked if I had heard of the HUB? Nope but I was curious. What is it and would this be a fit for us? I quickly googled it and after reading the vision statement

We believe there is no shortage of good ideas to solve the issues of our time. But there is an acute lack of collaboration and support structures to help make them happen. The Hub was founded to address this need. We set out to create a space that combines the best parts of a coffee shop, a regular office, and the comforts of home. We are a space with all the tools and trimmings you need to grow and develop innovative ventures for the betterment of the world. But above all, we offer a space for meaningful encounters, exchanges and inspiration, full of diverse people doing amazing things. The idea has been spreading like wildfire and resulted in the emergence of a global movement. To date, there are 30+ HUBS around the world, from London to San Francisco, from Halifax to Johannesburg. Another world is not just possible… it’s happening

I shouted out loud THAT IS US! We long to serve the common good, making our city a better place and why not do that with others. I expect those in our community to go into the world and bring God’s Kingdom of love, joy, and peace while I stay in my office and write sermons and do counselling appointments?? I don’t think so! I want to be in the middle of the conversations, I want to be at the table not promoting but listening. Not telling but sharing. Not consuming but serving. I believe it is in this environment we will truly be able to know and understand our city.So I am pleased to announce we have a new office space! May the listening and learning begin.

Are you studying your city?

A huge thanks to Casey van Wensem, a freelance writer based in Victoria, B.C., who does a great article on who we are at The Journey.

“What is a disciple?” asks Dave Harder. It’s a Sunday evening in mid-December, and Harder, pastor of the Journey church, is preaching to the hundred or so people gathered in the front room of the Old Ottawa South Community centre (known to locals as “the old fire hall.”) Early evening moonlight glints through the glass doors at the back of the hall as Harder waits casually at the front, wearing dark blue jeans and a modern black jacket over his fitted dress shirt.

“What is a disciple?” he asks again, pausing for effect.

Christians have been asking and answering this simple question for thousands of years, yet it seems to come up again and again. And when we think about it, it’s not really that simple of a question. What does it mean to follow Jesus, not as an apostle in the first century, but as a secretary in Ottawa with three kids; as a university student in residence at Carleton; as a person in this busy modern-day, complicated, and messed-up world?

The answer for the Journey, in the end, is simple, but before we get there we need to answer two other questions: First, what does it mean to be discipled by the place you live in? And second, what does it look like live on mission in that place?

In place
“If we never deliberately think through ways to rightly contextualize gospel ministry to a new culture, we will unconsciously be deeply contextualized to some other culture.” – Tim Keller

The Journey has no parking lot, no sanctuary, and almost no regular programming. There is no pulpit, no stage, no piano, and after the service everyone has to put their own plastic chair away. Yet after only three years, this church is ready to expand.

At the heart of the Journey is a radical idea that, in retrospect, doesn’t look radical at all. This idea is simple: to return church to the place where it once was – as the heart and soul of its neighbourhood. Harder wants the Journey to be not just one church planted haphazardly in a random part of the city, but a network of what he calls “city parishes,” or “neighbourhood expressions of church,” around which missional communities are built.

The reason this idea is radical is that it completely re-imagines what church looks like in contemporary society. The reason this idea is not radical at all, is that it has been done since the time of Saint Paul.

***
For many people, church is a place we go to. We often arrive by car, sometimes after traveling a great distance, and when we get there, we are often provided with things: bible study groups, men’s breakfasts, children’s programs, book clubs, basketball games, fundraisers, etc…

In many more traditional churches, Harder says, “most of your energy is consumed with what’s going on at church and there’s so little time left to actually engage with what’s going on in our city or our neighbourhood; what’s happening around us.” Part of the vision for the Journey, says Harder, is for it to be “not about going to a building and providing programs for people to come to, but actually loving the neighbour right beside us.”

For Harder, this new vision of what church looks like is actually not that new at all. “The parish goes back a long time to where church was really done specifically within the neighbourhood,” he says. “It’s really not doing anything new, but more joining in what has happened for thousands of years, and joining with a model of church that is lost within our cultural landscape.”

Parish churches were once common in places like rural England, and often served as a hub of not just religious activity but all neighbourhood activity. Part of the challenge for the Journey is to take a model that harkens back to simpler times and to apply it in the midst of a city where people live far from simple lives.

“Parish churches didn’t have parking lots because it was expected that people would actually walk to church,” says Harder. “Because we’re so busy driving everywhere,” he says, “we miss the rootedness that place brings.”

And while this may present a challenge, it is a necessary one. Statistics tell us that 80% of Canadians now live in metropolitan areas. So whether we like it or not, cities are where most of us live, work, and raise families, and where most people today will come to know Jesus.

***
Harder, along with his wife Kari and their three children, Emily (11), Kellan (8), and Kayla (5), arrived in Ottawa in the summer of 2008 to plant a church, and spent about a year doing almost nothing related to church planting. “I wanted to get to know my city, to be discipled by my city,” Harder says. “We went as a family on mission. We didn’t go as a family who wanted to plant a church. We were going to live on mission.”

For Harder and his family, this looked a lot like backyard barbeques, play dates at the park, and “going into coffee shops and asking a ton of questions.”

Now, after three years of operation in the old fire hall, the Journey is ready to open two new city parish churches in two Ottawa neighbourhoods: Orleans and Manotick. And while these neighbourhood churches will be a part of the greater “Journey network,” they may end up looking very different from the Journey church that meets in Old Ottawa South.

***
“What does it look like to actually live the gospel here?” asks Harder. This is the question behind what he calls the “theology of place.”

Recognizing the importance of place means that sharing the gospel in a suburban area like Orleans might look entirely different that sharing the gospel in a more urban neighbourhood like Old Ottawa South. “When you break it up into neighbourhoods I find that you can actually be more strategic in how you live the gospel in that place because you’re living into the story of that neighbourhood and then you’re applying the story of God to that neighbourhood itself,” says Harder. “It’s a very tangible way to live the gospel.”

Georges Larabie is a new pastor on the Journey team, and will be overseeing the Orleans church plant, which is set to open sometime in mid-2014. “The same vision will be shared across the Journey Network,” he says; “the challenge will be in properly contextualizing that vision to neighborhoods that are different from one another.”

Larabie and his family will spend 2013 as an “apprentice year” – a year to get comfortable in that neighbourhood, to better understand the people who live there, and to discover ways that the gospel can be shared with those people.

To help extend the good news into these new communities, Harder has plans to develop centralized ministries, which will look after tasks like payroll and communications for many neighbourhood churches all in one place. This, he says, will “help to lift off some of the administrative weight that most church planters feel” so people like Larabie and his family can “focus more on pastoring that community and living on mission within that neighbourhood.”

Which brings us to our second question: What does it actually look like to live on mission?

On mission
“When we extend the good news of the kingdom in Jesus, we are not ‘doing’ missions: we are acting as participants in the mission of God, which has been unfolding since the beginning of humanity’s story.” – Jon Huckins

Being a part of a church that is rooted in place means that people think differently about what a missionary is. Rather than thinking about going to “do missions” somewhere else, people think about what they can do to become missionaries in their everyday lives.

For Larabie, this means “simply recognizing that I am a follower of Jesus every minute of everyday.” It also means that we can take comfort in knowing that we are not setting out to create something brand new, but instead joining in with what God has already begun. “Living on mission is believing that everywhere I am and everywhere I go God is already at work drawing people to himself,” says Larabie.

For Journey member Conner Hildahl, living on mission means that “instead of having to travel across the world to tell someone about the gospel,” we realize that “our next door neighbour needs that in his life as well.”

Hildahl, a post-graduate social work student, arrived in Ottawa in September of 2012 with his wife Renee after spending time in San Diego with members of an intentional Christian community called NieuCommunities. There, they saw a vision of what a fully developed missional community looked like, and they were hooked. “Maybe this is something similar to a lot of people in our generation,” Hildahl says, “the idea of living more intentionally in the neighbourhood that you’re in and just being known and knowing people. I think that’s something we long for.”

When he and his wife arrived in Ottawa, they weren’t interested in doing the whole church-shopping thing. “Half of the experience of a church is just the community that you’re going to be around and you committing to them and them committing to you,” says Hildahl. “It’s more that just showing up and saying ‘how do you meet my needs?’” Oddly enough, or perhaps not oddly at all, this was the subject of the first message they heard at the Journey.

***
Part of what first struck this couple about the church was how welcoming the people there were. “They would do anything for us,” Hildahl says. For them, finding the Journey was an affirmation that they were part of a larger plan, and that God was active in that plan. “We wanted to jump on board,” he says.

It was this attention to personal relationships that first drew Heather Douglas and Andrew Dick-Douglas, another young married couple, to the Journey. Heather Douglas, who is studying to become a high school teacher, has been a part of the Journey for almost as long as Harder has. She was joined by her husband Andrew Dick-Douglas, now a second-year medical resident at a local hospital, in July of 2011.

“Our church started off as about 20 people and it was very relational,” says Dick-Douglas. “There were always people sharing stories… You kind of knew what was going on with everybody.”

A big part of this relational experience was honesty and openness. “People were really vulnerable with their stories and the things they had really struggled with. I think it was very refreshing for me,” says Douglas. “Even Dave [Harder] was willing to let the conversation go to the messier places of faith and not just shy away from that.” The challenge now, says Dick-Douglas, is to keep that relational attitude alive as the church grows to 100, 150 and beyond.

***
Part of the way that the church keeps this spirit alive is through what they call “huddles” – small groups of three to five people who meet once a week for fellowship and prayer. These groups are also places where people are free to be vulnerable and honest with each other. “The idea is to keep each other accountable and to see how each one is growing,” says Hildahl.

But with the church community growing so quickly, there have been many changes, and that change hasn’t always been easy. “We’ve had probably five separate occasions where our community has had to split because there were just so many people in it,” says Dick-Douglas. “With any growth there’s always a bit of pain that’s involved in it, because you need to be willing to let relationships grow, and if you hang too tightly to them there’s no space. It’s learning to let people go… and that’s a real challenge.”

As for Harder, seeing the community multiply beyond the church itself actually came as a surprise at first. “We didn’t know that the way of Jesus worked; that when you make disciples they go out and make other disciples.”

***
The fact that the Journey places such little emphasis on church programs means that people in the church have more time for other types of ministry. “If you’re committed to Monday night bible study, Wednesday night small group,” says Hildahl, “where’s the space in there to just invite your neighbour for a meal?”

For the Dick-Douglas’, this means that their home has become a busy place full of sharing, discussion, and celebration. As a student teacher as well as a volunteer youth worker, Douglas has developed friendships with several young people from their neighbourhood, and extended that friendship into her own home. “Our dinner table is generally a pretty active place,” she says.

This couple is also intentional about sharing their living space beyond their dinner table with people who might be in need of help. “We’ve got a spare bedroom in our house, and we’ve only had a few weeks in the years that we’ve lived here that it’s ever been empty,” says Douglas. “We’ve just tried to keep that space open and be prayerful and receptive to who could be in it.”

Sometimes this means that in order to live on mission, they have to become, as Douglas says, “comfortable with the uncomfortable.”

“[The Journey] is not a comfortable place if you’re looking for structure,” she says. That discomfort, however, seems to be the key to the health of the communities that are developing. “If we’re becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable of being the one in the room who doesn’t know people, or inviting people into your home, those are just such valuable experiences and skills to acquire,” says Douglas. “As uncomfortable as it is… it really requires us to make the effort on our own.” And making the effort on our own is a good place for discipleship to start.

On the Journey
“The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, ‘return home and tell how much God has done for you.’ So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.” – Luke 8:38-39

The Gospel of Luke tells the story of how Jesus cures a severely demon-possessed man who lived naked in a cemetery, and was kept under constant guard with his hands and feet chained up. When this man was cured, everyone was amazed to see him, sane and fully clothed, sitting at Jesus’ feet. The man begged Jesus to let him go with him, to let him be a literal follower of Jesus’ way. But Jesus said no. Instead, he said “return home and tell how much God has done for you.”

This is the sort of attitude that the Journey adopts when it comes to discipleship. The idea is not so much “come and see” as it is “go and tell.” For people like Larabie, this makes discipleship “more about following Jesus into the neighborhood through relationships than calling people out of the neighborhood to a Christian event.”

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Sometimes discipleship also means just taking God at his word. Walking in obedience to his voice.

Before moving to Ottawa, Harder and his family had lived in Calgary and then Vancouver, helping with church plants in both cities. But the idea to come to Ottawa was not a spur-of-the-moment one. “My wife and I had always dreamt about Ottawa,” Harder says, “and after 14 years of ministry, we just felt release that ‘now is the time to go.’”

It was their oldest daughter Emily, then eight, who best captured the thoughts of the family at the time. When Harder and his wife brought the idea of moving to Ottawa to their kids, Emily told them: “we’re going to miss Vancouver and our friends, but it’s more important that we’re obedient to God and his mission.”

“To have her capture that, with tears streaming down her face,” says Harder “was just a resounding ‘yes.’” From then on, Harder says, God has been the hero of the story – bringing people together, guiding their ministry, and creating disciples.

Which brings us back to the question: What is a disciple?

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Back in the old fire hall, Harder waits for everyone to come up with his or her own answer. Fortunately, he has also prepared his own. “Being a disciple is this,” he says, his voice reaching a gentle crescendo, “it’s not doing everything Jesus did, but learning to do everything I do in the manner in which He would do it.”

How do we fit into the world around us? How does that world inform our identity as a missionary? How would Jesus do the things that I do every day? That’s what it’s all about. And for the Journey, discipleship is what it’s all about. “It’s never about how many people are there on a Sunday,” Harder says. “Success for us is about transformed lives.”
And in the end, that all comes down to one simple question: “Are you following Jesus?” Everything else starts from there.

See this link to know more about the rhythms we are aiming to live at The Journey.